Creationist Wisdom #682: The Only Valid Argument

Today’s letter-to-the-editor appears in the News Democrat & Leader, a twice-weekly newspaper in Russellville, Kentucky. It’s titled Is there a God?, and the newspaper has a comments section.

Unless the letter-writer is a politician, preacher, or other public figure, we won’t embarrass or promote him by using his full name — but today we’ve got a preacher. It’s Larry Sitz of the Kedron Church Of Christ, which has no website. Excerpts from the rev’s letter will be enhanced with our Curmudgeonly commentary and some bold font for emphasis. Here we go!

Christians accept by faith that God exist [sic], because the bible tells us He does, and that He is the creator of all things. Humanist on the other hand believe that all that is the earth and the universe, came into being by mere chance with a giant explosion. God can neither be scientifically proved or disproved, because no one can present God as proof that He exist [sic]. Likewise, science can not prove that the universe and earth came into existence from nothing and evolved into this complex planet that we inhabit today.

Yes, that sums it up nicely. But the rev has even more to say about the futility of science:

Science itself declares that matter can neither be created or destroyed, so where did matter for a big explosion come from in the beginning? Scientific experimentation cannot prove that the universe came into being haphazardly by chance and neither can it disprove the existence of an all powerful creator. So, where does that leave us?

Egad — nobody has any proof of anything! Let’s read on:

Since we can’t use God’s word as proof in this discourse, because humanist don’t believe it is God’s word [the fools!], where can we go? First I would say, we can go to nature and look at the things that are. If we look at the delicate wings of a hummingbird and contrarily the armor like toughness of a rhino’s skin, we see a design and order that is incomprehensible to our human mind. Look at the sunrise, the stars, the sea, and the rain. Every single leaf. each blade of grass … .

Ah yes, it’s the familiar “Look out the window!” argument. Some find it persuasive. The rev continues:

Let’s just look at a few facts of our earth and solar system. (Encyclopedia Britannica) Could it be by mere chance we are exactly the right distance from the sun, which by the way has a surface temperature of near 12000 degrees, to keep us from burning up or being frozen solid? Is it by chance that our planet rotates on its axis at the speed it does … There are tens of thousands of other things that must be “just right” for life to exist on our planet. I can not see one chance in several million of this being a haphazard accident that we are here.

The rev finds it amazing that we evolved on a planet that was favorable for life. It would have been far more amazing, however, if we found ourselves in an environment that was hostile to life. Actually, the rev is using the Douglas Adams story of the puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, [it] may have been made to have me in it!” The Discoveroids think it’s a good argument for intelligent design — see Discovery Institute: What Are They Thinking?

Here’s more from the rev:

No one can ever disprove the existence of God by any means, and neither can they validate their theory of evolution, since something evolving from nothing is impossible.

Having utterly demolished the theory of evolution — to his satisfaction — the rev closes the letter with this conclusion:

We as Christians believe that God is our creator, who made the universe and all that is in it. Our faith in God, his power, and his truth, revealed to us through his holy word, is the only valid argument that makes any sense to me. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” Genesis 1:1

Most impressive! We wouldn’t dream of trying to debate with the rev. His arguments are too strong.

9 responses to “Creationist Wisdom #682: The Only Valid Argument”

The writer of that letter to the editor seems as if he never read a single science book in his life, which supports my personal hypothesis (NOT a “theory”) that gods were created by ignorant people to try to have at least SOME sort of explanation for things they didn’t understand.

No one can ever disprove the existence of God by any means, and neither can they validate their theory of evolution, since something evolving from nothing is impossible.

(1) Saying that something cannot be disproved isn’t the same as saying it has been proved. I can’t disprove the existence of unicorns, but that doesn’t mean they’re real.
(2) “Something evolving from nothing is impossible” is a statement of faith, not of logic. And in any case, who says it was from “nothing”? Scientists don’t know what came before the Big Bang, but that doesn’t mean they believe there was nothing at all.

The Reverend sets up a straw man, knocks it down and thinks he’s won the argument. It never occurs to him that if it were that easy to disprove Darwin’s ideas the theory of evolution would have been abandoned before the twentieth century began, let alone the twenty-first.

There are tens of thousands of other things that must be “just right” for life to exist on our planet.
Yes, like the bacteria that live deep within the earth that need neither sunlight nor oxygen, or inside the worms by scalding sea thermal vents or other volcanic sites, etc. We are finding more and more life forms in an otherwise inhospitable location for humans, but that’s impossible to the rev.

Personally, I think doG was man made. I can imagine my Dad creating some doG just to get little me to finally shut up and stop asking questions he couldn’t answer to my satisfaction. I asked thousands, nay millions of questions when I was young. I still question many things, religion in particular, but never get a decent rely to that one.
By creating some doG, then they tell kids like me, things are as they are because doG made them that way. No more arguments needed and of course no kids can ever question doG.
Oh dear, I did though. At about age 14, I asked a Sunday school teacher why doG planted “that” tree when he had to know that Adam and Eve would eat the fruit. An all knowing, all powerful doG MUST have known everything and NO, I did not allow her to use human free will as an out for doG. I nearly got excommunicated from the Lutheran church for that. Dad told me later that day I no longer needed to attend church or Sunday school ever again. Dad was my very first real hero before that day, but what he told me then cemented him as my top number one hero for my entrée life. Though he died in November 1980, he remains my hero. Religion, all of them and their various doGs can go take a flying leap.
Science told me why many things are as we see them to be. I’d like to know what was before the big bang. How that singularity that expanded during the big bang came to be, etc.. Maybe some day, in some distant future, if idiot politicians don’t destroy the planet, we may have some idea of what was before that event.
Sorry to ramble on so long. I talk too much, in person also, honest.

A couple of consequences of the principle that things must be just right for life.

This means that we know that things must have been basically unchanged for as long as there has been life. Things like the important parameters of physical laws: the speed of light, radioactive decay rates, etc. This means that there has been life on Earth for hundreds of millions or billions of years.

This means that whatever is responsible for life is constrained by the possibilities provided by nature. Life is not dependent on an omnipotent cause.